How a Haircare Powerhouse Innovates: Inside Amika with Jessica O’Keefe

Before a formula becomes a bestseller, it lives in a world few ever see. Today, Amika’s Jessica O’Keefe opens the door to that hidden side of beauty. Meet one of the innovators helping shape the texture, performance, and personality of the haircare brand we all know.

There are global brands that dominate the beauty aisle, and then there are brands that define an era. Amika sits comfortably in the latter — loud, bright, confident, recognizable from across a Sephora floor. But behind the palettes of colour and the cult-favorite formulas is something the industry rarely spotlights: the human brain quietly powering the innovation engine.

For Amika, one of those brains belongs to Jessica O’Keefe — a Product Development and Regulatory Consultant who blends chemistry, creativity, problem-solving, and long-game thinking into the formulas millions depend on. In an industry obsessed with founders and front-facing personalities, Jessica is part of the backbone: the builder shaping performance, identity, and the quiet magic of a product that simply works.

Today, Jessica walks us through a day inside the engine room of one of beauty’s biggest haircare brands — the unseen ecosystem where ideas become prototypes, prototypes become samples, and samples (eventually) become the next global bestseller.

This is haircare innovation, but make it Amika: bold, disciplined, technical, and deeply human.

Working Inside a Global Brand’s Innovation Engine

Jessica O’Keefe’s early foundation as a makeup artist gave her an intimate understanding of product performance and a knowledge base that naturally evolved into creating formulas herself. She was drawn to the intersection of science, creativity, and problem-solving, and at Amika, that intersection becomes her playground — now on a global scale.

“I built human connections and listened to customer’s firsthand feedback on products across numerous categories,” Jessica shared from her earlier career as a makeup artist. “It gave me not only a deep appreciation for how products perform in real life, but how they make people feel. Now as a product developer,  it continues to encourage me to look beyond marketing claims and focus on functionality, sensorial experience, and inclusivity within every formula.” 

Amika may look playful on the outside, but if fun is the brand’s aesthetic, rigor is its backbone. With a brand this large, the development cycle is complex — a matrix of moving parts that must align perfectly: manufacturers, R&D partners, ingredient suppliers, marketing, operations, regulatory, testing timelines – and the consumer expectations that keep escalating every year. 

“Truthfully, no two days are ever the same,” she told me when I asked what a typical day at the global haircare brand’s Brooklyn headquarters looks like. “Some days are entirely focused on lab evaluations, testing formulas through the lens of the consumer, and then translating that feedback into a clear, scientific direction for the incredibly talented chemists we collaborate with. Other days involve deep dives into documentation, efficacy testing, and ensuring accuracy down to the exact percentages of each ingredient within a formula.”

Throughout her time at Amika, Jessica reflects on the exceptional team of product developers she’s collaborated with, shaping ideas from concept to creation. She describes it as deeply inspiring to watch ideas come to life—whether they begin with identifying a performance gap, translating a trend through Amika’s distinctive lens, or drawing direct inspiration from the brand’s community. From there, the process becomes highly collaborative, bringing together creative vision, formulation chemistry, rigorous testing, and brand alignment. For Jessica, balancing that creativity with technical precision is where the real magic happens. Nothing is arbitrary, and nothing is left to chance. 

“It’s incredibly detailed work that most people never see behind the finished bottle.” 

That’s the part people never see. We see a bottle on a shelf. Jessica sees numerous samples, two rounds of stability testing, supplier back-and-forth, a Gantt chart with more colour coding than a Nascar lineup, and a development story that lives in both spreadsheets and gut instinct.

What Consumers Don’t See (But Product Developers Never Forget)

Behind every glossy launch is an unglamorous side of product development — the part where things go wrong. Timelines don’t always cooperate. Ingredients don’t behave the way you expect. Testing can reveal unexpected obstacles. Packaging compatibility isn’t always your friend.

Jessica walks us through these behind-the-scenes challenges, revealing what a product developer is actually thinking when the process veers off script. 

“I remember one instance of testing a skincare formulation that didn’t emulsify the way we anticipated, the lab loved the unique whipped-like texture and sent it over to us anyways. We loved it and that ended up inspiring an entirely new format.”

There’s a quiet resilience needed to build at scale, and Jessica reminds us all to stay open-minded and curious enough in order to see the potential in what initially might seem like a mistake.

“Sometimes innovative discoveries come from those simple mistakes.”

The beauty industry is in its innovation era — faster cycles, smarter materials, higher expectations, and global complexity like never before. The world sees Amika’s bold, unmistakable identity. Jessica sees the layers beneath it: the chemistry, the testing, the decisions, the hundreds of micro-moments that turn an idea into something tangible and trustworthy — all fueled by the quiet conviction that better is always possible.